Xinjiang

8 results arranged by date

This week, Washington D.C.-based Uighur journalist Shohret Hoshur, sent CPJ a message saying that on May 28 charges had finally been brought against two of his brothers, Shawket and Rehim, who have been detained since August. Hoshur, who works for the U.S.-government funded Radio Free Asia (RFA), is convinced they are being put on trial to punish him for his outspoken reporting, although officially they have been charged with "leaking state secrets," he says.

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New York, September 23, 2014--The Committee to Protect Journalists denounces the life term handed down by a Chinese court today to Ilham Tohti, a prominent Uighur blogger and academic, and calls for his unconditional release. Tohti was found guilty of separatism by a court in the western Xinjiang region, according to news reports.

When China hosted the summer Olympics in 2008 it promised greater press freedom, but six years later conditions for international journalists are increasingly more restrictive, as evidenced by a report released today by the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China.

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New York, July 9, 2014--Chinese authorities should immediately release two writers who have been placed under house arrest in Beijing, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. The move comes as China hosts U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

Two months into 2012, all-too-familiar stories are emerging from
China's troubled minority regions, Tibet and Xinjiang. Following riots against
Chinese rule in 2008 and 2009, violence and its corollaries--increased
security and censorship--have become commonplace. Independent bloggers and
journalists who cover the unrest pay a high price: Over half the 27 journalists
documented by CPJ in Chinese
prisons on December 1, 2011, came
from ethnic minorities. Now we're bracing ourselves for the next wave of arrests.

For
the first time in more than a decade, China is not the world's worst jailer of
the press in CPJ's annual census of imprisoned journalists. Among the 27 jailed in China,
one group has seen a massive jump in imprisonments. In another first since CPJ
began taking its census, more than half of those behind bars for reporting in
China are ethnic Uighur or Tibetan. What's more, two Uighur journalists have
been unaccounted for since their scheduled 2011 release. The
lack of information available about these cases is added proof that they were
arrested to deprive their communities of a voice.

Kazakhstan authorities have extradited Uighur schoolteacher Arshidin
Israil to China, where officials have described him without elaboration as a "major
terror suspect," according to Reuters
and other news accounts. Israil and his supporters believe the detention comes
in reprisal for reporting he contributed to Radio Free Asia concerning the July
2009 riots in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, according to Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Israil, a
native of Xinjiang, fled China after the unrest but was detained in Kazakhstan
in June 2010, according to news reports. He was extradited on May 30 of this
year, days after Chinese authorities censored
reporting and restricted online
discussion about ethnic unrest in Inner Mongolia--an autonomous ethnic region
like Xinjiang.

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New York, August 2,
2010—Three Uighur-language website managers were sentenced Friday to prison
terms of three to 10 years after being found guilty under broad charges of “endangering
state security.” The men had been jailed after ethnic
rioting in July 2009 in Urumqi, capital of the far-western, predominantly
Muslim, Xinjiang
Uighur Autonomous Region.